I felt good about the resistance activities we were running
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Alena Vondrášková was born on 29 April 1957 in Prague to Pavel and Marie Zradička. Her parents were communists and although they did not identify with the regime, they considered membership in the party the easiest way to a trouble-free life. Alena had disagreed with this since childhood. She says that the rebel in her arose on holiday in Bulgaria in August 1968, when the family learned of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Although she was only 10 years old, she did not understand why her parents did not want to emigrate. She was bothered by hypocrisy and lies. Because of the conditions at the University of Economics, she left in the first year of her studies and started to work. But the situation at workplace was no better, so she returned to university. She married while still studying and had a son. After her second maternity leave had finished, she started working as an accountant and manager at the Juventus Hotel, which belonged to the International Union of Students. She met her second husband Jan Vítek there. He was secretly printing the illegal newspaper Lidové noviny at his workplace. When they later married, they printed the newspaper at home, always at night when the children were asleep, until the Velvet Revolution. Later the family moved to Myslkovice near Tábor, where her husband set up a ceramics workshop. Alena Vondrášková devoted herself primarily to her four children, but also to public affairs. She lived in Myslkovice at the time of filming (2021).
